[schoen]

Following up on something I said further down in this thread, I think the OP meant to use "gendered" in a gender studies sense and not in a linguistic sense. I don't fully understand the meaning of "gendered" in the gender studies sense, but I think the OP meant something like "systematically associated with gender in some way".

I think the intended meaning is basically that there are cultural differences around whether people tend to express their enthusiasm for programming as "love" or not, and so Hacker School now doubts this term is the best indicator of whether a prospective participant has the kind of enthusiasm they're looking for.

It's true that "gendered word" has a totally separate meaning in linguistics, where it refers to the phenomenon where a noun attracts or requires agreement according to a class that the noun is in. In many languages these words need not refer to animate beings' gender at all, and in some languages the noun classes are totally abstract and unrelated to masculinity or femininity, although there's some disagreement about this terminology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_classes#Noun_classes_vers...

Anyway, I suggest reading the OP as saying "cultural differences, often along gender lines, in whether people commonly describe their relationship with programming as love".